ONCE WESTERVELT WAS BEHIND BARS, THE DISTRICT ATTORNEY wanted to wait for more police intelligence before he began preparing his prosecution. Although the new state law had increased kidnapping penalties, the state senate had complicated the Westervelt case by adding a grandfather clause to the bill. This amendment gave Charley’s kidnappers one month to present him in exchange for a lighter sentence.
The grandfather clause was necessary because less than two months before it was approved, the Lewis brothers had offered immunity to any kidnapper who returned Charley to one of seven business locations. Immediate enforcement of the new law (which sentenced perpetrators to a maximum of twenty-five years and accomplices to a maximum of fifteen) would have countered the family’s claims, sending a contradictory message to the criminal community. Therefore, the senate said, acts of kidnapping would result in the punishments stated by the new bill “[…] provided, that this shall not apply to the detaining or concealing of any child taken or carried away before the passage of this act, where the person or persons so harboring or concealing shall, within thirty days after the passage of this act, surrender up such child to the custody of the nearest magistrate or justice of the peace, or to the sheriff of any county within this Commonwealth.”
Upon Westervelt’s arrest, the police had only enough evidence to charge him as an accomplice, and because Charley was kidnapped before the new act was passed, Westervelt could only be sentenced under the old law, which had no penalty for accomplices. According to it, convicted kidnappers would serve a maximum of seven years in solitary confinement and a $2,000 fine; and if the police could not find evidence proving that Westervelt directly harbored Charley, then he would serve even less time as an accomplice. By law, police could detain a suspected felon for six months after an indictment before they had to either bring him to trial or release him. So if they wanted to bring the fullest charges allowed by the new bill against Westervelt, then they needed to gather more evidence quickly. Another hitch was the grandfather clause: if Charley was returned on or before March 25, charges against Westervelt would have to be dropped.
The police kept Westervelt’s name from the press after his arrest. No word of his incarceration reached the public for about a month, even though Westervelt told anybody who would listen that Walling had “kidnapped” him by sending him to Philadelphia on false premises. Such publicity would have benefitted the police, but in order to more fully make their case, they needed to actually find Charley and/or a kidnapper who would shoulder as much blame as Mosher and Douglas.
In the meantime, officials tried to protect Christian from any more false leads. When officers in Camden, New Jersey, arrested an Italian organ maker who was traveling with a young boy Charley’s age, two Philadelphia detectives went to identify the child. Because of Italy’s recent history of kidnappings (the Catholic church took children off the street to convert them), the American police continued to target Italian immigrants. The officers saw the Camden boy and immediately sent word to Christian—the child really did look like Charley. By 6:00 P.M., when Christian reported to the mayor’s office, the town had rushed to the police station after hearing rumors that Charley Ross waited inside for his father. Hundreds of people saw the child through the station windows and the doorway.
Christian walked past the masses.
He entered the building, looked at the child, and began to cry.
“It’s not him,” he said.
As Christian walked out of the building and back down the street, several people in the crowd wiped their eyes.
The arrested man could not properly identify the child. Even so, the police released the boy back into his custody.
Citizens of Savannah, Georgia, thought the kidnappers had resurfaced when two men approached another set of boys aged six and four. The younger of the two men, about five feet eight inches tall, had black hair. Behind glasses, his eyes held a deranged look. His partner had gray hair, a tall, skinny frame, and a small head and neck. Eyewitnesses heard the younger man speak very quickly in a German accent to the two boys, who apparently followed the men to a train station. There, more witnesses saw the group of four, later telling police that they assumed the party was headed to Europe. Detectives never found the kidnappers or the boys.
“We do right to pity Charley Ross,” the New York Tribune said, “taken from his comfortable home and loving father, but these other souls who have lost their way, belong by right to an honest, intelligent, virtuous life, and their father is God. Have we no outcry, no money, no pity for them?” The Tribune asked why the authorities of Philadelphia and New York were more committed to Charley’s plight than those of other kidnapping victims or unfortunate children. The editorial pled the case of New York’s street children, 25 percent of the city’s adolescent population, and of the eleven thousand street children in Philadelphia, more than three thousand were “from four to eight years old … found in different manufactories kept at work, from ten to fourteen hours a day.” As Philadelphia sent new Charley circulars to police stations and railway depots throughout America, the unsolved cases of other little ones disappeared after brief mention in the press.
Christian told the press he believed that more than half a million people were involved in the search for Charley. He said detectives, searching for his son from coast-to-coast, had spent more than $25,000 and had retained an entire group of clerks whose sole job was to pursue the leads, false information, and hoaxes spread by Americans and Europeans. Christian estimated that his team had mailed more than 700,000 circulars to police stations and train depots throughout the country. According to his count, police had interrogated more than two hundred gypsy bands for information and investigated the stories of more than six hundred children who resembled his son. By their own admission, police agreed that many of these six hundred children, misplaced themselves, were returned to the custody of adults who hadn’t provided enough information to keep the children from being questioned in the first place. This number itself was only a fraction of boys and girls across America who remained on the streets or in the hands of thieves, murderers, and traffickers.
But after all of the money spent, all of the manpower exhausted, all of the circulars mailed, and all of the innocent men and women interrogated because of skin color or lifestyle choice, one lead remained overlooked. Had the advisory committee involved detectives in their initial, secretive conversations sooner, had the police and private detectives cooperated with one another, had Superintendent Walling ordered his men to arrest Joseph Douglas before tracing Bill Mosher, and had he demanded the constant surveillance of Westervelt and his family once the informant proved unreliable, authorities might have noticed important contradictions in the Mosher family’s testimonies.